London theatre reviews

Like Hamlet, Twelfth Night is one of those god-tier Shakespeare plays that pops up so much at 'regular’ theatres that it feels relatively underproduced at the Globe. It’s a stretch to say it’s actually not suited to the Bankside playhouse (which is probably something you could say about Hamlet). But this new production feels like an object lesson in what can go wrong with a Globe Twelfth Night.

It’s been years since there was anything secret about Secret Cinema. The immersive entertainment franchise that began life as cool screenings of mystery films in mystery locations has long been too big a deal – and required too big an audience – to leave things to chance. But massive success has left it in danger of looking artistically adrift, locked in a competition with itself to stage ever more lavish extravaganzas based around ever more obvious films…

There is some very stiff competition, but Lerner & Loewe’s Brigadoon – a romance about a time-travelling Sottish village – might well stand as the maddest musical of all time…

If there’s any larger venue fit to house Duncan Macmillan’s mini masterpiece, it is @sohoplace. In a co-production between Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin, the play is once again performed in-the-round, with the audience on all sides encouraged to join in and play their part. Over the course of its three-month stint, Donahoe, Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins and Minnie Driver will all take the lead role, but tonight’s performer is Lenny Henry.

This new play by American writer Doug Wright comes to the Barbican from Broadway heralded by a 2023 Tony Award for star Sean Hayes (Will & Grace) and is about someone you’ve likely never heard of. Oscar Levant was a pianist – best known for playing George Gershwin’s music – and a humourist, who popped up in a handful of films including An American in Paris. 

The puppies are back in town. Following its 2022 premiere at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, 101 Dalmatians returns for a limited summer run — this time wagging its tail across the proscenium stage of the Eventim Apollo.

Rosamund Pike gives a gale force performance in this even better companion piece to Jodie Comer-starring hit Prima Facie.

Bizarre, excessive musical adaptation of the Christina Aguilera film, based around the talents of US reality show contestant Todrick Hall. 

First announced aeons ago and presumably costing a bob or two to create, this Elvis Presley-based immersive show is a slick affair, heartfelt in its admiration for The King. It’s by Layered Reality, who have had notable immersive successes with the ongoing adaptation of The War of the Worlds and the Tower of London-based The Gunpowder Plot.

It’s also somewhat structurally eccentric, comes with a difficult-to-defend ticket price, and – when I visited anyway – clearly suffered from its audience not being crystal clear about what it involved from the off.

This sparky indie musical about a lonely Irish schoolboy who forms a band to escape a drab ’80s Dublin adolescence is a charming affair that reunites the architects of offbeat musical smash Once, as playwright Enda Walsh again adapts a movie by Irish filmmaker John Carney.